Chapter three - Learning leadership.

 

Your husband learns to be a good leader by you actually allowing him to lead. Your submission, or lack thereof will determine whether your husband will develop any leadership skills, and this is instrumental in determining the quality of his leadership ability.

 

Can leadership be taught in a classroom, or by reading a book?  Perhaps a small amount might make sense.  As an example, In driver education classes, some material is taught in a classroom, but it is not until you are sitting behind the steering wheel of a car that you really learn how to drive.   Imagine getting behind the steering wheel of a car the first day of driver's education, stepping on the gas pedal and it sometimes applies the gas, or sometimes it applies the brakes. The steering wheel may or may not turn the car in the direction you want to go, or it might just honk the horn.

 

Do you blame the driver, and say that he just needs to have more classroom lessons?  That guy would just wind up parking the car, never really learning to drive. In the same way the husband with an unsubmissive wife will never really gain any confidence in his leadership ability,  because leadership isn't the real problem, God has already given him that. It is the lack of your obedience to him which is the real root of the problem.  Leadership cannot really be learned until you have someone who recognizes that you have the authority to lead and is willing to follow your lead.

 

In my time spent in the military, I noticed that a good leader was a person who assumed and relied on the obedience of his troops. A poor leader never seem to have confidence that his troops would follow his orders. Most of the time the highest ranking Sargent under the officer set the tone for respect and obedience to him, making him a good or bad leader. This concept extends to every organized event.

 

Only the members of the orchestra respond to the baton. Only the members of the choir sing when the director moves his hands. The team members hear many comments from the sidelines, but obey the voice of their coach. The point is that it is obedience to the leader that produces beautiful music, or a winning team. Each team member playing the way he or she thinks is best, produces chaos. The maestro, choir director, or sports team coach only look good by the submission of his group to the leadership of the person in charge.

 

It is very common in a marriage with an wife who chooses not to be submissive, to have a wide range of responses from the husband to deal with her rebellion.  These responses range from the one extreme of completely giving up, and yielding all authority to the wife, to the other extreme of physically dominating her, even leading to wife abuse, verbally or physically beating her to get her to submit to his authority.

 

But the majority of the time a husband will eventually settle for neither yielding to her authority nor trying to force his authority on her.  He will just determine to live in the same house, sharing some of the household chores, splitting the household bills, having relations once in awhile when he can, but he will not take the responsibility of leadership.  Often the wife will gladly accept this arrangement of equality, only to find out later in life that she has the extra burden and cost of children added to her share of the household duties and financial load.  We see this in the complaints of the wives as to the unfair distributions of household chores and money later in her marriage.

 

As mentioned, your willingness as a wife to submit to your husband's leadership is key to the quality of leadership that he develops, and the quality of his leadership at home is the foundation for any potential leadership position in the church.

 

The qualification for a deacon;

 

1Ti 3:11  Even so must their wives be grave, not slanderers, sober, faithful in all things.

1Ti 3:12  Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well.

 

The qualification for a pastor or bishop;

 

1Ti 3:4  One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity;

1Ti 3:5  (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?)